Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

No magic pill

Personal finance is easy. Spend less than you make. Put that extra money into the market in a low-cost index fund. Rinse and repeat every single month for decades, until you are ready to retire. You can say it all fits on an index card.

But like losing weight - eat less than you expend in energy, what’s easy on paper is difficult for people to execute. That’s why American obesity rate is top 10 in the world. (GLP1 agonists to the rescue!) And consumer credit card debt is at an all time high.

From watching personal finance shows like Caleb Hammer, what I am seeing is that people do understand what needs to be done, but the salience of that action is buried under a pile of emotions hijacking the brain. That forthcoming vacation is way more exciting to think about. The DoorDash delivery person is coming soon with that burrito you deserve after a long day at work. Why yes you absolutely should spend a year’s salary on a brand new car.

The boring and unexciting slog of wealth accumulation never stood a chance against those positive emotions. Just like the cozy and comfortable couch beckons you to abandon your difficult and tiresome workout plans for the day.

It can’t be all down to willpower, right? To mentally fight against the easy and pick the hard. Because we all know that willpower is fleeting. Our marvelous minds can convince and rationalize us of (and out of) anything. Spend six-figures on a car? Of course! I am a card-carrying car enthusiast. Hashtag man maths.

Unfortunately, unlike weight loss, there’s no magic pill for debt.

Here's a good reason

I think it’s ridiculous if people are truly not buying a Tesla car just because of Elon Musk’s antics in the Trump administration. The Model 3 and the Model Y remain some of the best electric cars you can buy. If I were in the market, I would not hesitate to buy one, no matter how supposedly toxic the CEO is. Much like you can appreciate the god tier levels of musicality with Kanye’s earlier work, even though the current him has clearly gone off the deep end.

Obviously, car purchase is not a rational decision. Otherwise we’d all be driving Toyota Corollas for multiple decades. America has such a robust car market precisely because so much emotion is tied to the vehicles we drive. We buy a BMW because we detest the usage of turn signals. Guys buy overly large trucks so they can (potentially) run over spandex-wearing wimps on bicycles.

So I can understand (though still ridiculous) why people are souring on the Tesla brand. In this current political climate, the Tesla badge carries a negative connotation. People think that owning a Tesla car is an endorsement of whatever the heck Elon Musk is doing. Though I wouldn’t go too far with that line of thinking; those folks mustn’t look up how Volkswagen was founded…

What should deter people away from buying a Tesla is the enormous cost to insure one. For fun exercise, I hypothetically replaced my expensive to insure BMW M2 with a poverty-spec Tesla Model 3. And there was practically no change to the insurance. Comparatively, if I were to swap the BMW with a Toyota 4Runner, my insurance premium would be cut in half.

I should sell the M2 and get a 4Runner…

Hit button, get reward

You would be mistaken to think that addiction to short-form videos like TikTok or Instagram Reels is an American phenomenon. I get it: it's easy to paint that stereotype upon us. A nation so addicted to food (we are fat) would then easily be inclined towards addiction to TikTok. Fill every void in your day with an endless scroll, with quick dopamine hits one after another. Congratulations, we've officially solved the problem of boredom! So long as you have the money for a smartphone (public libraries offer free Internet), you'll never have to deal with the demons in your mind ever again.

Well, it's not just Americans with this zombie dopamine drip-drip going on. The fine citizens of Guangzhou (China) and Seoul (South Korea) are also seemingly obsessed with the short-form never ending loop. The subway trains are full of passengers staring at their phones, glued to latest video served up by the algorithm. You know you have a safe society when people can stay utterly enmeshed to their devices on public transport, without any fear of it getting stolen. You would be crazy to do the same here in the States. I've unfortunately have seen my share of phone snatching. Pro tip: at least don't be near the doors if you're doing to be staring at your phone.

I completely understand the allure of short-form videos. It's just another thing of social media created to keep us mindlessly occupied. I don't pretend to be a superior breed simply because I don't partake in TikTok or YouTube Shorts. There's no illusions here that browsing Reddit or going on X isn't the very same thing. We're all seeking novelty and excitement to placate the void when we are in between tasks. Heck, sometimes we even multitask. Taking a dump at the toilet has forever changed since the invention of the smartphone.

Here's a challenge: next time you poop, stare at nothing.

And this might not even be a problem that needs solving. Addictive qualities do not always create harm. Otherwise you would have to kill me to pry my morning coffee away. Social media is part of the fabric of modern life. Get over it. The genie is much too fat to go back into the bottle. Just because you're able to go an entire plane ride without looking or listening to anything doesn't make you some modern monk worthy of praise. If anything, you might be the weird nail that's sticking out, begging to be hammered.

The grand return

Hey, good news: they let me back into this country! I guess that bus fare evasion ticket from over a decade ago isn’t enough to have me deported to a foreign country. (Tongue in cheek obviously, but for the record I am a full citizen of these United States.) It’s always lovely to hear the immigration officer say “Welcome home.”

It’s indeed great to be home. Over the course of two weeks in China and South Korea, I somehow managed to lose 10 pounds. You’d think with the overwhelming amounts of delicious foods over there (cheaper, too) that I’d return home with more flubber. I was fully ready to work off the extra poundage until I stepped on the scale and found out I’m actually lighter. I guess cardio is a very effective weight-loss lever: 25,000 steps every single day is enough to overwhelm all that I ate whilst on vacation.

Good to know that next time I can eat even more.

What isn’t so pleasant after my return is the intense jet lag. For the week afterwards I was struggling to stay awake past 10:00 PM, even though my scheduled bed time is 11:30 PM. Multiple days of sleeping over 9 hours wasn’t enough to break the spell. It probably didn’t help that soon after I came back to America, I contracted a nasty cold. A double whammy.

Happy to report I am now mostly recovered.

Whenever I go on these multi-week excursions outside of the country, I carry with me the gratitude of being able to take paid time off. To be able to go on vacation without worrying about the job, and knowing that any slack left behind will be taken up by my colleagues. That’s worth everything. In a time of great uncertainty and change, I try not to take for granted the fortunate position I find myself in vis a vis employment.

Many more happy returns.

The Healy travel luck

I have what my friends jokingly refers to as the “Healy travel luck.” It seems that when I go on vacation, things go very smoothly for me. And I’m not the type to obsessively plan things out into a rigid schedule. Serendipity has been kind to me, it must be said. Weather seems to cooperate where ever I go. The restaurants I encounter are all fine and delicious. A local immediately appears whenever I get stuck in a quandary when I’m in foreign countries.

In 2025 I wanted to make the annual trip home to Guangzhou, China during the QingMing Festival. It’s a yearly event where Chinese people visit their family burial sites to pay respects. I’ve never done it for the family on my father’s side (all residing in China), so the excitement was considerable.

But there’s only one problem: early April in Guangzhou can be rainy. And it’s the sort of tropical rain that you’re hopeless to defend with an umbrella. Never mind performing the rites: the rain is so heavy that you’d never get out of the car. My attention was glued to the weather forecast in the weeks leading up to the trip, with the unfortunate prediction that it was going to rain on the day of the visit to the graves.

Enter the Healy travel luck. It did rain that day, but it started in the afternoon. By that time, we were completely finished with the ceremonies in the morning. Funny enough, the sky opened up like crazy soon as we got back into our vehicles for the trip back to the hotel. It cannot get any more fortuitous than that.

Of course, I’ve completely jinxed myself just by typing out the previous paragraphs. Farewell, good fortune!

Reward without the work

In conversations with my aunts and uncles back in my home country of China, I’ve come to understand the supposed ennui of Chinese millennials (and younger). The “lying flat” movement that’s been popular on social media (until it got taken away). Young adults of the country are dissatisfied with the high-pressure achievement culture, and therefore are instead opting out of contributing to society (and themselves) in any meaningful way. Let’s just work enough to sustain.

I now see where the dissatisfaction stems from. Retired folks like my aunts and uncle are really living the good life. Government pensions are relatively generous, and retirement age relatively low (60 for men, 50 for blue-collar women workers that my aunts belong to.) Back in the day, these people were also provided with government-sponsored housing, or were able to buy a flat when it was insanely cheap in comparison to the real estate bubble of this millennia.

Chinese retirees own there flats outright, and are drawing a healthy monthly income from the government. This legion of folks goes out to eat all the time, and travel domestically and abroad whenever they fancy. We’ve all heard of the “Chinese dama” phenomenon: middle-aged Chinese women going on a tours and wrecking havoc on the local citizenry.

The younger generation see this with great envy. Principally because the price of a home - as it is anywhere in the first world - is astronomically unaffordable in China. And honestly, who doesn’t want to eat out at restaurants all the time? Traveling is also best done when you still have some youth and vigor. (That’s why I don’t regret spending a ton of money on travel this past decade of my late 20s and early 30s.)

You can see the problem: Chinese millennials want to skip right to what their parents have - without putting in any of the (long) time and work. This is the same reason people gamble on the stock market by throwing it all in on GameStop. The slow and steady growth is too boring and not fast enough. Now is a good time, not tomorrow. Social media showing the highlight reels of everyone else certainly doesn’t help the situation.

But monetary physics doesn’t allow for instant, overnight wealth generation. So in the face of an immovable object, it’s the easy way out to instead hate what you want. Who needs to own a home? That’s stupid. Working long hours to climb a corporate ladder for wealth? That’s just some societal bullshit. Travel? The home is where it’s at. A smartphone with an unlimited cellular plan is all that’s needed.

That’s lying flat in a nutshell.

Do not pass go

One thing I realized as I was leaving Guangzhou (China) heading to South Korea: the United States don’t care when people are departing for international. There’s no customs check, there’s no immigration check. America is probably so ecstatic at you leaving the country that they don’t want to spook you into changing your mind with additional barriers.

The only stamp on your non-U.S. passport when you visit the States is the entry.

(Countries I’ve visited) China has immigration control on exit. So does, Thailand, Japan, and Taiwan. This creates a need for travelers to get to the respective airports earlier. The security check presents enough of a choke point - why add another one? Homeland Security - or whatever a country’s equivalent - should only care about what’s coming in. You know, protecting the homeland. It’s the destination country’s problem to handle if a traveler ends up being the unsavory kind.

Surely a flight manifest is enough data for a country to determine if a person has left the country. Unless of course your name is Carlos Ghosn, and you had to smuggle your way out of Japan in a cargo box.

The way America handles this is the right way - immigration upon entry only. Unless of course the government of a particular country wants to prevent its citizens from so easily leaving its borders. Though even North Korea wouldn’t need immigration check upon exit? Because I am (hopefully correctly) assuming that there isn’t an airline in the world who would sell/operate a flight out of the upper Joseon peninsula to a North Korean citizen.

Look at that, America doing something outside of international norms, but it’s actually good.